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Hot Houses, Cool Designs

“The future is shiny and new, just like it was supposed to be--none of that Blade Runner, Star Wars, cyber-noir grit and grime. And we can live any way we want, anywhere we please. Everything is possible.”--David Byrne

For architects working at the leading edge of residential design, it’s not that everything is possible, it’s that anything is. That’s the beauty of it: designing a private home is a lot like painting a blank canvas. It presents a rare opportunity for experimentation and innovation because residential clients tend to be adventurous, the scope of inquiry focused and the approval process direct. Plus, no one presupposes where the process will lead. For two alumni-owned studios on the West Coast, teasing out the unique personality of a home requires “a journey, with destination unknown,” as Byron Kuth BAR ’86 puts it. He’s speaking for San Francisco-based Kuth/Ranieri Architects, whose other principal, Liz Ranieri BAR ’86, balances her time between the practice and looking after their three kids. “It’s not just about accommodation,” Kuth goes on to explain. “If a client has a strong sense of curiosity and is interested in heading on a journey, and is excited about us as guides, we know the project will succeed.”

While Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan BAR ’85 now spends only about 25 percent of his time on residential projects, he has taken that journey a number of times and loves the fact that he always ends up somewhere else. “If a client is going to hire an architect, they’ve already made an enormous leap of faith--they’ve separated themselves from the general population, from the larger commercial housing market,” he says. “What I look for in a prospective client is that they have a good sense of what my work is about and a clear sense of what they’re about. But it’s also important that they want to do this--to take a leap--because it’s a complex, exhausting, expensive, emotionally and psychologically trying process.”

So trying, in fact, that Maltzan now ends up rejecting a lot more residential clients than he accepts. Because it’s such an intense and lengthy process, Kuth/Ranieri also finds that it pays to be “very honest” about who they are in initial meetings with prospective clients. otherwise, the journey can be downright hellish.

Still, given a confluence of cultural, societal and technological changes that have radically affected our lifestyles and in turn, what we want from our houses, both firms agree that it’s a particularly interesting time to be doing residential work. “In the past the design of the house responded to certain cultural ideals expressed as spatial types or iconic characteristics--classicism, modernism, postmodernism,” Maltzan points out. “The house is so much more transitional now. The house’s traditional reinforcement of stability has disappeared--it now needs to incorporate change as a quality.” Now, the traditional single-family home with three bedrooms, two baths, a two-car garage and an acre of lawn is going the way of the generic family--which accounted for only 25 percent of America’s population in the 2000 census. “There’s not the gathering of waters that we saw in the 1950s and ’60s with a consensual enthusiasm for modernism,” Kuth says. “So now you work within your own stream.” Without standard expectations or prescriptions for “modern living,” these architects are free to offer thoughtful and articulate responses to the specific needs and expectations of clients whose nontraditional lifestyles are the only thing they have in common.

studying
Although the point of embarkation is still “based on very traditional circumstances of architecture: site and program,” as Kuth puts it, the challenge is to “look at latent opportunities within these circumstances and develop strategies to bring them forward.” Maltzan agrees that site and program help initiate the discussion, but believes there are really two unequal components to the process: “There is the quantitative--understanding what your clients need, how much they need, how they might want to live. That gets you to a point.” But it’s the second part--the qualitative aspect--that he finds especially inspirational: “Spending time with them, studying them, watching their body language. The psychology of those things is most important for me.”

Maltzan makes no apologies for the fact that when meeting with a new client he “can’t get the house the first time.” In fact, both firms agree that it’s only by letting the process unfold over a period of 18 months or more that they really get to know the owners well enough to develop the design of their dreams. In most cases, this results in homes as unique to the individuals involved as their own DNA.

Take Maltzan’s Hergott Shepard Residence in Beverly Hills. Completed in 1999, it was among the most talked-about projects in the Museum of Modern Art’s popular show, The Un-Private House. Maltzan designed the unorthodox home working with a gay couple who are both professionals in the entertainment industry and have a large art collection. Because neither owner is interested in cooking, Maltzan made the kitchen noticeably small for the size of the house. However, he placed it strategically--adjacent to the garage so that it can be used by catering services when the couple entertains and hosts frequent political fundraisers. The central living areas function as public spaces for these events and also house the owners’ large art collection, in two distinct gallery spaces scaled to accommodate the size of the works. With no children in the picture, Maltzan devoted the entire upper level to one of the home’s two offices and a single suite for the master bedroom, a dressing area of almost equal size and a master bathroom with no tub, but two adjacent shower stalls. Reflecting his clients’ interests and lifestyle, he gave the most space and most dramatic views to the gym, which is complemented by a slim lap pool that tucks into the urban site like the final piece of a puzzle.

For both Maltzan and the owners, the house successfully solves one of the thorniest issues in residential design: how to separate but connect the public and private areas of the home. “How these two worlds intersect shifts and changes over time,” Maltzan points out. “That intersection, though, is the profound moment when the house says something culturally important and defines our ambitions for who we are both as individuals and members of a larger whole.” His clients, Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard, couldn’t be happier with Maltzan’s melding of the two worlds: “The house makes a bold public statement while maintaining a reassuringly private and secure sense of domesticity. It creates and reflects a narrative for our lives. It is also a functional sculpture.”

surfacing the surface
The desire to create architecture with the impact and resonance of a powerful work of art also drives Kuth/Ranieri to explore new ground. “The house historically has been this sort of crucible for innovation, with tectonic, linguistic and spatial ideas being explored,” Kuth says. But for his firm--with its strong industrial sensibilities--it all comes down to surface, or the phenomenological effect of surfaces. “Our world has been reduced to surfaces--computer screens, advertising, television,” he says. “So, we’re trying to reclaim a tactile and physical presence in a world obsessed with electronic and consumer imagery.”

If their ideal is a tactile architecture--with “a cerebral tactility that invites you to caress a space with your perceptual facilities”--Kuth and Ranieri don’t superimpose surface solutions on their designs. Instead, membranes emerge from a process. “Our designs evolve from a fast-sketch dialogue. Our hands talk faster than our brains, so we speak in the medium of drawing.”

As the journey leads them to new discoveries--about their clients, the program and the site--there is much “discussion, digression and conceptual work done around the kitchen table,” Kuth smiles. That’s how they’ve approached the Lerdal Residence, due to be completed next May. The site, adjacent to a eucalyptus grove in San Francisco’s fog-enshrouded Presidio Park, offers the perfect foil for the 6000-sf house they’re designing for a family of five. Responding to their clients’ love of photography and extensive collection of contemporary works, Kuth/Ranieri knew they needed to design a gallery. But after getting to know the family they went further and extended the gallery out, draping a 25 x 40’ glass scrim over the facade, built up from a curtain wall sheathed in translucent glass. “Like the eye of a camera, it just records circumstances,” Kuth explains. “Liz and I have been very interested in the notion of icon versus index”--i.e. the contrast between emblematic images and more neutral documentation. “This facade becomes a record of the time of day, of the reflections brought in from other surfaces. And its image is as ephemeral as the fog in the eucalyptus grove.”

When in the process did Kuth/Ranieri and the Lerdals realize they were on to something? With houses, Maltzan says “you know you’ve gotten there when the clients are just bouncing off the walls with excitement, asking: ‘When can we build? When can we build?’, and you’re at a point where you don’t want to stop working on it.”

That’s where Kuth/Ranieri is with another experimental project, calling for the conversion of a 6,000-sf industrial shed on a two-acre vineyard site in Napa Valley. Responding to their clients’ need for a four-bedroom home, studio space and communal areas for both intimate and larger public gatherings, the two principals combined their quick-sketch brainstorming and kitchen-table digressions with ongoing meetings with the extended family who will occupy the “bunk house.” The result? A structure that will sort of shimmer out of focus on the edge of the Napa River. Sheathed in a single, diaphanous skin of semi-translucent fiberglass panels, the renovated structure will seamlessly connect to the surrounding landscape while housing a host of alternative environmental systems: a large shade canopy with a lacework of solar voltaic cells will provide electricity and a covered area for parking and outdoor activities; a solar water heating system will be sandwiched between structural plywood sheathing and the translucent corrugated skin; and a pair of evaporative coolers will have feed ducts side-mounted to the walls of a void down the center of the building. “The primary objective with the proposed enclosure is to create an armature for the internalized play of light and shade--a luminous ensemble of muted solids and voids,” Kuth says, adding: “We want to destabilize the experience of surface and edge.”

final destination
Whether working on residential or other major projects, Maltzan, too, aims for an instability of sorts. “There is a kind of intangible or indefinable element that I try to get into the work regardless of the scale,” he says. “Whether it is a lighting fixture or a museum, we approach our projects in a very similar way. The difference is in time, scale and materials, but the process is very similar for all of them. There’s an enormous amount of back-and-forth.” Right now a lot of that back-and-forth has to do with the entrance and exhibition spaces he’s designing for the $28.7-million temporary MoMA in Queens, which will house the museum’s collection and exhibitions while the Manhattan facility is closed for construction from 2002-05.

With this project, as with his residential ones, Maltzan believes the test of whether he has ended up at the ideal destination is if “you look at the design and it has this kind of flickering quality that [indicates] it is not complete but somehow desires to be. In [this contradiction] there is the sense of openness, inclusion, optimism and light I’m looking for.” With residential work, Maltzan looks for “the level of conceptual intensity that [he] hoped for and an impression that it is fitting the client perfectly. If the house is doing both well, it exists separately from you and the client.” Kuth and Ranieri also look for this transcendent moment at the end of the journey; they know their design has worked when “you walk into a finished home and it becomes a synthetic experience and you are immersed in a subtle way in all its intentions.”

As for what the future may hold in residential design, Maltzan points out that “a lot of the more experimental ideas about the house being explored by architects today have the potential to lead or inform the broader domestic market.” But given the political, social and economic uncertainties of the times, “it’s difficult to predict where the larger realm of housing is going to go. If the country continues to become more conservative, then the house will reflect that. If the economy continues to struggle, that will cause people to pull back and think about housing differently.” In any case, he says, “the very thin edge of the wedge--the architect-designed house--will continue to experiment and push these issues because it can.” Ultimately, the American residential landscape seems destined to become as unique, diverse and nontraditional as the population of the country as a whole. Why? Because architects like Kuth/Ranieri and Michael Maltzan have internalized what they learned at RISD and are using that to shape the way we live. “RISD taught me that you should be suspicious of what lies on the surface,” Maltzan sums up. “The more profound and compelling answers are levels deeper. That’s your goal as an architect: to find the deepest layers of meaning you can. Projects--houses--supported by that level of intensity and meaning are the ones that have a truly enduring impact.”

text by Liisa Silander